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English
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Published:
2016-08-28
Updated:
2017-05-26
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44,108
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11/?
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Brothers after all

Summary:

Mike Ross and Neal Caffrey as brothers but lost contact as teenagers. They are both adults and have somehow found new types of families when they reconnect again. As they try to make up for lost time a freak accident suddenly gives them a changes to build new childhood memories. But who will take care of them? Peter and Harvey of course!

Notes:

This is my first cross-over fic, it was a suggestion from a guest reader to my other story. It will be OCC and I have changed a few things from the shows. Hope you enjoy!

Chapter Text

Prologue.

Mike had never told anyone at Pearson Hardman about the fact that he had a brother.

Neal was just a few years older than him, but they had always been very different. When their parents died Mike had been 11 and Neal had just turned 14. They had dealt with the accident very differently, Mike had taken it the hardest and it still plagued him. Neal always said that it was because of his memory. He could remember every moment with their parents and Neal couldn’t.

Neal had been much closer to their father. He had really admired him and wanted to be like him. Neal was always talking about how he wanted to be a cop like their father had been. When they had to move to their grandmother Ellen she had never encouraged that choice of work. The reason for that they found out when Neal turned 18 and Mike was 15. Neal left after that.

Up until then they had been fine. Sure there were though times sometimes and Mike and Neal spent much time by themselves since Ellen was forced to take on a second job to be able to provide for the three of them. The two brothers didn’t mind so much though since they both enjoyed each other’s company and they rarely fought. Mike liked to read and Neal always encouraged him. Neal was clever for his age and sometimes too clever for his own good. Neal liked to test Mike’s memory in different ways and sometimes they would go to different museums and Neal would have Mike read up beforehand about the exhibitions to later have him tell him about the art when they were at the museums. Mike enjoyed it though. Sure, art was a bit boring, but he liked to hang out with Neal.

Things changed when Neal turned 18. He was crushed by the truth about their father and the fact that everything he thought he had known turned out to be false. He felt betrayed and humiliated and made the choice to leave. He just felt like he needed to get away from it all. He needed a fresh start and needed to rebuild himself. The decision to leave was nothing he took easy though. The hardest thing about it was to leave Mike behind. He would always regret the fact that he didn’t even say goodbye to Mike, he just left that they when Ellen told him the truth. He felt really bad for leaving her too of course, but he just couldn’t stay there anymore. Everything he had known was a lie.

He had called Mike from a payphone that night. Mike had picked up after the fifth signal, he had been in bed. The younger brother begged Neal to just come back home.

“Neal, just come back home. Grammy isn’t mad at you. She is out looking. She says she is worried.”

“Mike I can’t come back. I’m sorry. I just need to leave, okay.”

“But why? I don’t understand.”

“Mike, I just need to do this, okay.”

“But what will you do?”

“I don’t know yet, I think I’ll move to the city or travel.”

“I want to come with you Neal. Please take me with you.” Neal could hear that Mike was crying over the phone. He bit his lip as he felt sorrow dwell inside him.

“I can’t Mike. You need to finish school, and someone needs to look out for Grammy.”

“Will I ever see you again?” Mike asked holding his breath as he waited for Neal’s reply. He hoped with all of his heart that the answer would be yes.

“Of course you will. We are brothers. Love you Mike.” He hang up before Mike had the change to reply. Because if he kept talking with his little brother he was going to change his mind about all of this. He quickly walked away from the payphone towards the bus stop.

“Neal, Neal? Please are you there? I love you too. Neal?”

Mike spoke even though he had clearly heard the dial tone when Neal hang up. He just didn’t understand. Why did Neal leave just like that? He had just gotten home from school and been met by his grandmother who had told him that Neal was missing and that she was going to go out and look for him. He would have to make his own dinner today and then he would get to bed and not wait up for her. He had tried to ask questions and demanded he go with her, but she had firmly said no. She even raised his voice towards him when he persisted. She had almost never done that before and he stopped where he was in the middle of the living room and watched her leave.

But Grammy didn’t find Neal and he didn’t come back. The really hard times started for Mike then. He was alone with Grammy now, and she refused to tell him the real reason why Neal left. She told him something, but he could see on her that she wasn’t telling him the truth. He just couldn’t understand why she was lying though. What had happened?

He pressed her about telling her what she knew, but she stuck to the lie and after some time he just gave up with trying to get her to tell him. He could see how much it pained her when he brought it up. She started to get worse after Neal left. She had been quite old already when she had to take them in, but now you started to notice it on her as well.

Mike went through different phases when it came to Neal leaving. At first he missed him terribly and he thought that Neal actually would come back. He went out to look for him himself, he went to Neal’s favorite museums every weekend in hope that he would turn up there and he even went to the city and wandered around there by himself for hours and hours until he missed the last train home and had to take the bus. Grammy had not been happy and had grounded him for two weeks. Every time the phone rang he would rush to get it in the hopes that it was Neal calling, but it never was.

The longer Neal was gone the angrier Mike got at him. How could he just leave him like that? They were brothers, they were supposed to have each other’s backs. He needed Neal. Now he had no one to help him at school when the other boys picked at him for memorizing the entire text book, now he was all alone. Neal left him alone. Just like that, like he didn’t care about Mike at all. He just cast him away like he was nothing. It angered him and he found that it was easier to deal with the loss of his brother with anger than anything else. Anger made the hurt easier. If this was what Neal had wanted, then fine, so be it.

Time passed and he met Trevor and they became best friends. He grew up, started collage and got into trouble. He was caught cheating on a math test and expelled. He didn’t get to go to Harvard that had been his dream. He started smoking pot. He started working as a bike messenger to pay his rent and to pay for Grammy’s care. He had to put her in a home after she started to become forgetful. For a few years their relationship had been difficult, but it was good now. After all, she was all he had. She was his only family and he would do anything for her.

Then he got the news that he needed a large amount of money to be able to keep her at the home. He got desperate and choose to take the easy and fast way out of it by agreeing to deal drugs for Trevor.

That was how he met Harvey and his whole life changed. It got good and interesting and he was challenged intellectually for the first time in his life. He loved it. Even though it came with a lot of pressure since he didn’t have a law degree and he had to lie to people daily. But it was all worth it. Harvey was great too. Mike would never admit it, but he kind of looked at Harvey as a father figure.

Mike tried hard to not to think about Neal. No one in his surroundings even knew he existed. That somewhere out there Mike had a brother. He never spoke about him with anyone. Grammy tried a few times.

“I would like to tell you something about Neal.” She would say to him, but he wouldn’t listen.

“I don’t want to talk about him Grammy.” He would answer and if she continued he would just get up and leave. Stupid when he thought back on it, but he just wasn’t ready to deal with it. His anger and hurt towards his brother was still there, especially since he could recall every minute with him like it was yesterday, and that was just too painful. He rather didn’t talk about it at all.

Things for Mike were going great up until the day when Grammy died.

As tears were streaming down his cheeks as he cleaned up her room he were to find something when he went through her closet. On one of the shelf's hidden behind some shoe boxes he found a small wooden chest. It had the name Neal written on it. Mike’s life were about to change the moment he opened that box.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Neal’s life took another turn from the moment he left. He moved to New York and met Mozzie and started a new chapter of his life. A totally different one then he had originally planned and he found himself on the other side of the law than had been his long term goal up until now.

Along with the whole fresh start thing he decided to change his name from Neal Ross to Neal Caffrey which had been his mother’s maiden name.

Life in New York were new, fun and exciting. He did whatever he wanted or at least was able to do. He got better and better of doing things that most people wouldn’t with the help of Mozzie. He met Kate and fell in love. He thought that he was living the dream. It was just one thing that hurt him and it was the thought of Mike, and the fact that he had been leaving the kid alone. Sure he had Grammy, but Mike had always been a social person and he loved to hang out with Neal. Mike had also taking the loss of their parents so hard, and when he was younger he had used to ask Neal why they had to leave. Neal had tried to comfort him and told him that “You still have me. We are always going to be brothers” he remembered those words as he was sure Mike did as well. He had failed Mike big time. He knew he had and it was the biggest regret of his life.

After his first few weeks in New York he had decided to send Mike a postcard to let him and Grammy know that he was okay. He was sure that they worried a lot. With Mozzie’s help he set up a post box and wrote down the address to it on the card so that Mike would be able to answer him. However he never did. Neal sent a new card two weeks later, but got no reply on that either. He wondered the reason as why Mike didn’t reply. He even sent a postcard to his own address to make sure it got there. It did.

Maybe Mike was angry at him for betraying him like that. Maybe he just needed some time. But Neal didn’t want him to think that he wasn’t thinking about his younger brother, so he continued sending Mike post cards. He sent a new one at least twice a month, sometimes more often than that. When he travelled, he did it from every new city he visited. On the cards he would write small greetings, tell him about what he was doing, certain funny things that had happened to him, he would describe a new museum he had went to or sometimes he would just write “Love Neal” on them. He kept it up for years. When he knew that Mike had turned 18 he also wrote that he would love to meet up again. He had decided to wait until Mike was 18 because then he would be an adult and able to make his own decisions, just in case Grammy didn’t approve of them meeting. Mike didn’t respond, and for a while he was discouraged. Didn’t Mike want to see him? But after three weeks he wrote another postcard. He wasn’t going to give up.

He had to change the post box when the feds got on to him and wrote Mike a new one every time. He would explain it with that honest versions of their dad was looking for him. But never once did Mike reply. He didn’t want to believe it that Mike didn’t want to have anything to do with him, so he just couldn’t stop sending them. He loved Mike and Grammy, but sometimes had his doubt that it was mutual. Maybe he had hurt them too much by leaving. He had thought many times about going to see them, but had gotten cold feet every time. He felt bad after those episodes and cheered himself up by getting a new project, like a complicated heist or something with Kate and Mozzie.

Then things happened and Kate disappeared and he started to look for her. He didn’t send the postcards just as often then. And when Peter were closing in on him and he knew that he probably was going into a trap just to see her again, he wrote the last postcard.

He went to trial, got sentenced to four years in prison. He didn’t write to Mike from there. He couldn’t do that to Mike, because he wasn’t sure if the FBI knew about Mike, and if he wrote from the prison they would find out for sure. He couldn’t expose Mike and Grammy like that and have the FBI storm in to their lives like that because of him.

Then Kate came and said goodbye and he just had to go after her. She was the one for him. She was the one that he wanted to start a family of his own with, and he knew that he was hurting her by being in here. He had to escape. So he did. But he was too late and Peter Burke caught him again.

Neal saw his chance to get out of here and he took it. It was not only Kate he had in mind when he got the deal with Peter and got the anklet. He was also thinking about Mike. He really would like to try again and reconnect with him. He had been thinking about him a lot in prison. He really missed him. They were brothers after all.

As he was working with the FBI and looking for Kate he also did some research on Mike. Mike and Grammy’s apartment was way out of his radius but he got Mozzie to head over there and try and talk to them. Only to find out that they weren’t living there anymore. At first he felt stupid, after all it had been years, Mike was an adult and Grammy was a lot older. He had the terrible thought that she might even not be alive anymore. But after some research he found out that Mike and she had moved out of there a few years earlier, just a few months after he went to prison. He found out that Grammy now lived in a retirement home, but Mike however he couldn’t find an address to. He had been rolled in to a collage for some time, but there he had been registered under Grammy’s address.

The retirement home was also outside his range, but he decided to write her a letter in which he apologized for everything and asked her for Mike’s address or to at least let Mike know that Neal was looking for him. Nothing happened now either. He even called the retirement home and asked if his grandmother had received his letter, and was told after some persuasion that she had. She had chosen not to contact him he then understood. He took it as a sign that neither her or Mike wanted any contact with him. It hit him hard and he became more obsessed with finding Kate, much to Peter’s dismay.

The relationship between him and Peter grew into something that Neal had been longing for all these years since his father had died. This was how a father should behave he thought, and he couldn’t help but look up to Peter and really trust him. He loved Elisabeth as well, Peter’s adorable wife. He had a pretty good life he had to admit up until when Kate died and he had to go back to prison. He almost gave up on everything then. He felt like he had nothing left now and he had himself to blame. Kate was gone and the two people that were left of his family didn’t want anything to do with him.

But the thought of finding Kate’s killer got him to want to get out and back to the deal with Peter. But times were hard and he missed her incredibly, and along with that he started to miss Mike and Grammy more and more. He used to lay awake at night and think about how life could have been with Kate, or how life would have been if he just hadn’t left like he did all those years ago.

He knew that Peter could see how upset he was, and he knew that Peter worried about him. It was sweet actually, but he just couldn’t tell him about Mike. He feared he would break if he started talking about Mike. And there was a risk that Peter would start digging, maybe find Mike and go and talk to him on Neal’s behalf, and he just couldn’t have that.

He sometimes wondered what Mike was like now. How did he look? What was he doing? Was he okay? Did he have people around him that cared about him? But mostly he wondered if he ever was going to see him again. His little brother.
As fate had it, he would. And his life would change drastically.